Rural Shanghai

Gordon can tell you more about our visit in his blog. But I could not resist a photo or two from our afternoon visit to the truck-farming area West of Shanghai.

After lunch, we walked a few blocks to a "wet market" on the Fudan University campus. A wet market, as you should know by now, is a vegetable and fresh-meat market (and other things too, often). Even the fancy housing developments always have a wet-market nearby. There, small-scale vegetable-stand owners cultivate long-term relationships with their urban clients. High-falootin' market research studies have demonstrated that Ikea and Walmart can't come near to the customer loyalty and client retention achieved by these mom and pop vegetable and meat vendors. They are personable, they know their product, they know their customer, and they know how to help strange American people who ask weird questions. They answer honestly, on terms that make sense to wet-market merchants.
We asked how we might get to the truck-farming area West of Shanghai, and we were told to take bus number 55, then the ferry boat, then another bus. We took the bus. Two RMB each for Gordon and for Carment and for me. Then, across the Wangpo river (that was 50fen, by purchasing a little yellow chit that we threw into a metal pan at the ferry-boat entrance). We crossed the river, dodging the barge traffic. (Or the young captain-in-training did, under the watchful eye of a more senior boatman). Rather than bump along in a bus for another half hour, we decided to negotiate a rate with a cab driver. He took us further west.

We passed the BioChip place that we had been to that morning, and about a mile away, the countryside began to open up. Flat, green, and fallow, with lots of little plots. There are plenty of canals (you see them from the air) and they are as much for water removal as for a place from which to pull water up in the dry summer months.

Here, flowers and ornamentals—nursery stock—seem to be replacing tomatoes and vegetables. But its all farming of a kind. The ponds have fish; there is burned fallow and mulch in piles, and a few folks working on a little ditch here, watering some late-season winter vegetables there, or kindly opening a gate for visiting gringos and answering a few questions.

Our patient cab driver took us to a little village, now about to be overwhelmed by Shanghai suburban sprawl, where we found a fertilizer shop, one of 100 such franchise shops, where we poked around the ammonium nitrate and sundry chemicals. The manager was cordial, but said that bio-char sounds rather expensive. Gordon has some thoughts about that.

Then, we ended up at "My House Restaurant," the sort of private-home turned eatery that has really fresh really local food. The jellyfish was crispy and sweet-sour, the duck tongue was fresh enough to quack, and the beer was cold enough.

It was a bit of what Dominique Desjeux calls the "product itinerary," a way for an ethnographer to grasp where things come from and how they change their meaning(s) as they move about in exchange systems. Here, we had fertilizer, water, plastic to cover the farm-plots, seed, herbicide (maybe), the vegetables, then the final product in the My House restaurant being cooked, then the results on a plate (with a nice sauce, by the way), then satisfied noises from tired, tour-weary gringos. Each step along the way, the things that were required to create what we ate took on new meaning, different value, passed through many hands. Global hands.

Fertilizer from Belgium, sold by a franchise store to private farm-ground tenants, who send the vegetables into town for the likes of us gringo visitors to enjoy. Its good, solid clay ground that needs some soil-building, but farmers are a conservative lot. What will they pay for? Can they make their own bio-char? Stay tuned, and ask Gordon.

Meanwhile, we remember the innumerable labors that brought us the food at My House restaurant, and wonder what sorts of exchanges, values, and relationships were generated by our sitting down to rest our tired bones and feed our hungry stomachs in Shanghai, one lucky afternoon in March.